The Frame

In the year 2007, no fewer than four films featuring an unplanned pregnancy and its aftermath were released: Knocked Up, Waitress, Juno, and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Though each of these films deals with an unintended and unwanted pregnancy as the major plot point, they represent among them two different countries, three different genres, and three different levels of Hollywood involvement. Knocked Up is a mainstream Hollywood romantic comedy, Waitress and Juno, respectively a dramedy[1] and a comedy, are both festival favorites partially funded by Hollywood’s specialty studio divisions, placing them in an awkward semi-indie position; and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a Romanian drama. Given the differences in genre and expected audience[2], how stable would the structure of the unplanned pregnancy plot be across these four films? As Rick Altman points out, not all films "relate to their genre in the same way or to the same extent" and we can recognize "differing levels of ‘genericity’" (637). Would the unplanned pregnancy structure be strong enough to change the way the films relate to their existing genres, thus becoming a viable genre itself?

The questions guiding me as I watched and analyzed the films included: To what extent do these similarly-themed films adhere to a common structure? To what extent is that structure modified by intersecting cultural, generic, and audience codes? What do the differences in structure between the films tell us about the culture, genre, and audience expectations? Can the unplanned pregnancy film be considered a subgenre, or do the differences turn out to be more significant than the similarities? I will go through each film and analyze its structure, particularly the way the pregnancy itself is treated and how the pregnancy fits into the overall goal and story-arc of the film, as well as the way the pregnancy plot is modified by other cultural, generic, and audience considerations. Then I will try to draw some conclusions about the nature of the way unplanned pregnancy is depicted in film and whether the "unplanned pregnancy film" can be considered as a genre.

Knocked Up

Knocked Up’s unplanned pregnancy stems from a drunken one-night stand between slacker guy Ben and ambitious career woman Allison. After Allison discovers she is pregnant, she and Ben try to have a relationship, but their attempts are complicated by their very different personalities and goals in life. A subplot involving the marital issues of Allison’s sister Debbie and her husband Pete mirrors the problems that Ben and Allison have trying to establish their relationship. Eventually, both the subplot and main plot are resolved amicably, and Ben, Allison and their child become a family.

Knocked Up’s treatment of pregnancy is the most straightforward and complete of the four films under consideration, hence it serves well as a starting point. In order to analyze the structure of the film, I have broken it into sixteen sections somewhat arbitrarily, but mostly guided by the stages of Ben and Allison’s relationship and of the pregnancy itself. The pregnancy plot is begun in Section Two, in which Ben and Allison meet and have unprotected sex. In Section Four, Allison finds out she is pregnant, a sequence which can be broken down into several steps. First, a title card tells us, the audience, that eight weeks have passed and we see a shot of cells dividing. Second, Allison is sick at work. Third, she confides in her sister, Debbie. Fourth, she and Debbie buy several pregnancy tests and they are all turn out positive. Fifth, she decides to contact Ben, who she has not spoken with since their rather uncomfortable morning-after breakfast. These two sections contain several pregnancy clues and indicators. (1) Ben and Allison have sex without a condom. This foreshadows for the audience but not for Allison that pregnancy is a possible (and given the needs of the narrative, probable) outcome; she does not know that Ben is not wearing a condom. (2) Cells start dividing after eight weeks—an indicator completely on the narrative level, which Roland Barthes defines as that level which foregrounds the relationship between reader and text (Barthes 110). No one within the story knows about the pregnancy at this point, or has any idea that cells are dividing to create a fetus, but the audience is given this information. (3) Allison is ill. Morning sickness is one of the most common indicators of pregnancy in films (in fact, it is the only one found in all four of the films under analysis), and it announces not only to the audience but also to Allison’s coworker that she is pregnant. (4) Multiple pregnancy tests are positive. Home pregnancy tests are, like morning sickness, found in many modern movies involving pregnancy.

Moving on in the plot, Section Six includes a visit to the gynecologist to confirm the pregnancy as well as Ben and Allison separately discussing the pregnancy with friends and family. In this section comes Knocked Up’s only mention of abortion, as Ben’s friends argue over whether it would be better if they just got the thing that rhymes with "smasbortion" and Allison’s mother recommends that she get it "taken care of." The actual word "abortion" is never used, and in fact, in creating a rhyming euphemism, Ben’s friends suggest that the concept should not really be discussed openly. Allison decides to keep the baby, but her decision is not explained. Sections Seven through Twelve are largely taken up by Ben and Allison’s not-wholly-successful attempts at building a relationship rather than by the pregnancy itself. Section Thirteen shows the parents, currently not together, getting ready for the baby—Allison getting ultrasounds and attending Lamaze classes, Ben preparing a nursery. Sections Fourteen and Fifteen concern the labor and birth itself, during which Ben and Allison are reconciled. Section Sixteen shows, in montage under the credits, the first year or so after the birth, as Ben, Allison, and their daughter form a happy family.

From conception to early childhood, Knocked Up shows all of the stages of pregnancy and includes most of the elements commonly associated with pregnancy: morning sickness, pregnancy tests, doctor’s visits, ultrasounds, hormonal mood swings, nursery preparation, labor, and birth. In addition, it indicates the passage of time to the audience by flashing up how many weeks into the pregnancy we are. It is more closely structured around the pregnancy than any of the other films, and is the only one which shows the initiating sex scene in chronological order. In the larger story of the film, Ben is the real main character; according to Propp’s spheres of action, he is the hero, the one with an implicit goal or quest—to learn to take on responsibility and mature into the role of father ("Dramatis Personae" 80). Allison is largely a static character, changing only enough to be able to accept Ben’s efforts. Taking the male point of view is somewhat unusual for a pregnancy film (the other three films under analysis have female protagonists), but it is not unusual at all for the other genres which inform Knocked Up.

Not only is Knocked Up a mainstream Hollywood comedy, but it falls into a specific subgenre of Hollywood comedy associated with writer/director/producer Judd Apatow. Apatow’s films, even the ones he produces but does not direct, constitute a genre of male-focused broad comedy, usually starring a schlubby sort of guy (Seth Rogen in Knocked Up, Will Ferrell in Anchorman and Talladega Nights, Jonah Hill in Superbad, John C. Reilly in Walk Hard) who either succeeds by flouting his image or by taking responsibility for his life through the encouragement of an attractive girl. In both cases, the women act as foils for the men; Allison is granted a little more personality than most women in Apatow films, but the journey of the film remains Ben’s. The pregnancy is plot is arguably used as a catalyst for some other goal in each of these films, but only in Knocked Up does that goal belong to the father.

Waitress

Waitress follows Jenna, woman whose incredible pie-making ability is overshadowed by her miserable marriage to self-centered and misogynistic Earl. She works at a little diner, trying to secrete enough money away from Earl to be able to leave him. After becoming undesirably pregnant, she carries on an affair with her gynecologist Jim. When the baby is born, she has gained enough self-confidence from Jim’s loving treatment and from becoming a mother to both kick Earl out and end the affair with Jim, and carries on her new life, just her and the child at the diner she has inherited.

It is more difficult to separate Waitress into discrete sections, largely because she has two ongoing relationships, one with Earl and one with Jim, which rise and fall at different times. In addition, her relationship with the elderly diner owner is an integral part of Jenna’s quest for independence and cannot be easily separated out and treated as an incidental relationship. The subplots involving her two friends and their romantic entanglements mirror and comment on Jenna’s own struggles, but are not segmented the same way structurally (Knocked Up’s subplot fell neatly into the same exact sections as its main plot). Waitress exemplifies Barthes’ statement that "sequences move in counterpoint; functionally, the structure of narrative is fugued" (103). Still, the elements of the pregnancy itself can be separated out and examined.

In only the second shot of Jenna (the first has her making pies, the central motif of the film, and a clue that she will not be as bad a mother as she expects), she is in the bathroom of the diner with her friends Becky and Dawn taking a pregnancy test, which is, to her dismay, positive. She goes to the doctor to confirm the pregnancy in Section Four; when she is clearly unenthused about the prospect of having a child, he starts to point out that they do not perform abortions, but she cuts him off before he gets to the word "abortion" and says she is going to have the baby even though she does not want it. As in Knocked Up, no reason is given for her decision, though she later writes a letter to her unborn baby that indicates she may simply respect its right to live—a pro-life statement despite Jenna’s lack of affiliation with any political or religious entities. Jenna has a bout of morning sickness in Section Five, and finally tells Earl about the baby in Section Ten; his only fear is that she will love the baby more than she loves him (an ironic fear, since at this point, she loves neither). She has an ultrasound in Section Eleven. The preparation of the nursery occurs in Section Fifteen, but only because Earl finds Jenna’s stash of money and she must pretend it was for the baby instead of for her escape from Earl. Section Seventeen contains the birth; as soon as Jenna sees her daughter, her demeanor changes completely and she falls in love with the child. Section Nineteen finishes off the film with Jenna and two-year-old Lulu happily baking pies for the diner, which now belongs to her.

Though the motivations and personalities involved are often quite different from those in Knocked Up, the depiction of pregnancy is remarkably similar on the functional level. Both mothers conceive during a rare, drunken sexual encounter (though in Waitress the sex takes place before the film begins, thus being part of the story but not of the plot [Bordwell, Narration 50]); both verify their pregnancy by home pregnancy tests first, with the moral support of one or more close confidants, and by a doctor’s visit second; both refuse abortions without any visible deliberation; both undergo ultrasounds; both postpone revealing their pregnancies to their employers out of fear of being fired, and are pleasantly surprised by their employers’ lack of concern; both films culminate in the labor and birth; both include brief scenes of the first year or two of the baby’s life and the family’s happiness. Both also include morning sickness, but it occurs in a different place in the narrative, which may point to a functional difference, since "the meaning which a given function has in the course of action must be considered" (Morphology 73). Allison is sick before knows she is pregnant, thus morning sickness serves as a clue to pregnancy which must be verified in a later scene with a pregnancy test, whereas Jenna’s experience with morning sickness occurs after the doctor’s verification, thus it becomes only a sign of an already confirmed pregnancy. In fact, in Waitress the signifier "being sick" signifies on both the functional level, the level of plot, and actantial level, the level of character, as defined by Roland Barthes (Image 88). Jenna is sick when Joe, the diner’s owner, reads something from his horoscope about "ones you love," and both Joe and Jenna admit that they don’t have any ones they love—thus her being sick conjures up the connotation of her revulsion regarding her husband, her unhappiness at her situation in life, and her desire to love someone. Hence "being sick" signifies both "pregnancy" and "desperately unhappy character."

As suggested by the integrational nature of the sign "being sick," Waitress is a much more character-driven narrative than Knocked Up. Though of course Knocked Up has actantial signs to indicate that, for example, Allison is ambitious and Ben is immature, there are far fewer of them than in Waitress, and many of them reinforce the same characteristics rather than reveal new or changed ones. Knocked Up has large sections that are intended only to be funny, furthering neither plot nor character, while in Waitress even the sections that are funny almost always reveal something new about the characters or refine their relationships with each other. This is largely due to the fact that Waitress is a less mainstream film than Knocked Up, aimed at festival audiences and arthouse theatres. It is not a completely independent film, being financially backed by a major studio’s specialty arm, but it has one foot in the indie world and one foot in Hollywood. This more and more common situation has led to the neologism "Indiewood" to describe such awkwardly in-between films. Indie films tend to be much more based in character than plot, and Waitress reflects that element of its indie heritage.

Juno

The expectant mother in Juno is a sixteen-year-old high school student, overly clever and a bit of an outsider. Her pregnancy is the result of her first sexual experience, which occurred before the film begins but is shown in brief, intercut flashbacks. Rather than abort or keep the child, Juno decides to give it to an adoptive couple, yuppies Mark and Vanessa. However, before the baby is born, Mark leaves Vanessa; Juno gives the baby to Vanessa anyway and renews her relationship with the Paulie Bleeker, her best friend and the baby’s father.

Again we find several of the same elements of pregnancy as in Knocked Up and Waitress, with a few notable differences. In Section Three, directly after the credits, Juno buys a pregnancy test at a convenience store (the third that day, the clerk notes) and takes it in the store’s bathroom. Though she does not have a confidant providing moral support, she shares the results with the store clerk, thus creating an ad hoc community around the confirmation of pregnancy. She then immediately calls her friend Leah, who will be a major, if rather flaky, source of support throughout the film. At this point, Juno assumes she will "procure a speedy abortion" (the only use of the term in the three American films). In Section Six, she goes to the abortion clinic, but is put off by the condom-offering teen receptionist, the general shabbiness of the place and the other women waiting, and the protestations of a picketing pro-life student. Ultimately, she cannot go through with it and decides upon adoption instead. Juno meets the prospective parents in Section Twelve, and mentions that she has been to the doctor, but that she hasn’t been sick at all. Though the doctor’s visit confirming pregnancy happens off-screen, it does occur, and though Juno is notably not subject to morning sickness, it is acknowledged as a normal sign of pregnancy. The fact that morning sickness is considered normative and Juno does not suffer from it indicates that she will not, in fact, fulfill the role of mother in the film. Also, Juno mentions that she is more concerned about getting fat, fearing the ridicule of her peers; this fear roughly corresponds to the fear that Allison and Jenna have regarding the reaction their employers will have to their pregnancies, replacing "job" with "reputation" as the potential loss. Section Fifteen contains the ultrasound. Vanessa takes over the role of motherhood that Juno has refused in Section Eighteen, as she prepares the nursery and reads What to Expect When You’re Expecting. The birth comes in Section Twenty-Three, and Section Twenty-Four wraps up the baby plot as Vanessa takes the baby home.

Note that out of twenty-three sections, only seven deal directly with the elements of pregnancy. The pregnancy is an undercurrent throughout, but most of the film deals with Juno’s attempts to make sense of a world in which relationships are easily broken, trying to find hope that two people can actually love each other forever. Mark and Vanessa seem to hold out that hope, but they break up, just as her own parents had. The pregnancy allows her to see a family which seems perfect but is deeply flawed due to Mark and Vanessa refusals to let each other be who they are, in turn allowing her to recognize the much more accepting and real love that Bleeker has for her. In one sense, the baby itself does not affect Juno’s life; she immediately gives it to Vanessa and returns to being a teenaged high-school student. But the experiences that being pregnant led to caused her to reconsider her relationship with Bleeker. Juno, like Waitress, is an Indiewood film concerned with character more than plot, yet the structure and signs of pregnancy again remain fairly similar to those found in Knocked Up.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

In 1987 Bucharest, Romania, university student Otilia makes clandestine arrangements for an unknown purpose that involve her roommate Gabita, a hotel room, a mysterious man, and a lot of money. Eventually it becomes clear that the roommate is pregnant and trying to get an abortion, which is illegal in Romania at the time, and must be handled with great secrecy to avoid arrest. After requiring extraordinary measures from the two women, the man, Bebe, induces a miscarriage, leaving them to wait until the miscarriage occurs, which could take a few hours or a few days. Otilia leaves briefly to fulfill a promised appearance at her boyfriend’s mother’s birthday party, then returns to find the miscarriage complete and disposes of the fetus. The film ends in profound ambiguity, Otilia and Gabita scarred by the process, but with no clear resolution or vision for the future.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is vastly different from any of the three American films discussed above. It contains very few clues or signs of pregnancy until the mysterious man explains the about the abortion procedure, which does not happen until Section Five (out of thirteen), nearly halfway through the film. Before that point in the narrative, it would be nearly impossible to guess what is going on without having read synopses of the film. In fact, morning sickness is the only sign of pregnancy that appears in the film outside of the dialogue, and even that is not completely clear—Gabita sends Otilia to meet Bebe, claiming that she is too sick to go. And later, after Otilia tells her boyfriend that the timing of the last time they had sex puts her at risk of pregnancy (and by extension, of needing an abortion), she vomits in an alleyway. Whether these two instances of sickness can be tied definitely to pregnancy, however, is an open question—it is never revealed whether or not Otilia actually is pregnant. There are no pregnancy tests, no doctors, no ultrasounds, and obviously no preparation for a baby. The only "test" for pregnancy is having missed periods, a test which is itself ambiguous, since Gabita cannot remember (or will not reveal) how many she has actually missed. There is a birth, if the off-screen miscarriage onto the bathroom floor can be considered a birth.

Obviously the story of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days precludes many of the elements of the pregnancy plot that are present in Knocked Up, Waitress, and Juno. A story foregrounding an illegal abortion stands in stark contrast to ones that follow a pregnancy to term and end happily for the protagonists. Yet it is not only the plot that interferes with 4 Months‘ use of the pregnancy codes exploited by the other three films. Initially, the film is structured as a thriller, presenting an enigma (what are these two women getting themselves into) which is answered by the revelation of the abortion in the middle; however, the questions begged by the abortion and its aftermath are never answered. Who and where is the father? He is never mentioned. Why is it so important that the baby be terminated? Presumably the cultural and political codes of the Eastern Bloc did not look any more favorably on unwed mothers than they did on abortion, and Gabita did not have the means to care for a child on her own. Relatedly, does Gabita really want to have an abortion? Several times her hesitation in answering Bebe’s questions indicates that she does not, as does her desire for Otilia to bury the fetus rather than dispose of it in the trash. Is Otilia pregnant or not? And if she is, what will happen to her? Will her boyfriend marry her, as he has said he will do in such a crisis? Or will she pursue an illegal abortion, too? In the final shot, Otilia turns and stares straight into the camera for a split second, as if relinquishing all attempts at making sense of the situation to the audience. But we have been given no more information than she has, and we are left as profoundly unsettled as she is.

The openness of the ending as well as the film’s very noticeable formal qualities indicates another genre informing 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days: that of the art cinema. David Bordwell suggests that art films, as exemplified by 1960s and ’70s European filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini, have enough similarity in structure, style, and content to constitute a genre. He notes several elements of art cinema, including the open ending: "With the open and arbitrary ending, the art film reasserts that ambiguity is the dominant principle of intelligibility, that we are to watch less for the tale than the telling, that life lacks the neatness of art and this art knows it" ("Art Cinema" 722). 4 Months fits this description far better than any other genre it resembles, including the thriller, and as such is generically separated from the three American films, all of which are more or less comedies and essentially conform to Bordwell’s description of the classical Hollywood cinema in their tendency "to develop toward full and adequate knowledge" (Narration 159).

Comparative Analysis

This analysis shows a fairly regular similarity in the way that "pregnancy" is signified and structured in the American films. Signs that appeared in all three films include: morning sickness (or notable lack thereof, in Juno’s case), home pregnancy tests, friends and family providing moral support, a brief consideration of abortion (which is ultimately refused), doctor’s visits, ultrasounds, fear of recrimination from peers/employers, preparation for the baby’s birth (carried out in Juno by Vanessa, the surrogate mother figure), the birth itself, and a happy ending involving the creation of a couple or family unit, or both. In addition, all three American films depict the unplanned pregnancy as a fluke—none of the couples engage in frequent sex, either with each other or with other partners. The Romanian film contains only a few of these pregnancy elements, and they are either ambiguous or markedly different from the American films in most cases: possibly morning sickness, something like a birth but not really, a friend providing moral support (and in fact, Otilia, the friend, is really the main character), an abortion, and fear not only of disapproval, but of criminal charges.

The way abortion is treated across the four films is particularly interesting. Obviously it is the main plot point in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in a way that it cannot be in a post-Roe vs. Wade American film. Abortions are neither illegal nor difficult to obtain in the United States, and most people opposed to them are so out of moral or religious conviction. None of the women in the American films are portrayed as religious, and Allison and Juno have particular pressure on them from peers to get rid of the child. Jenna seems to have ethical reasons for not wanting an abortion, but neither her nor Allison’s decision making processes are revealed. Only Juno seems to seriously consider an abortion. One reason for this resistance to abortion is simply that the stories would not exist, could not exist in the modern United States without the mother’s conscious decision to keep the baby. The cultural norms demand that abortion be an option, but it must be eschewed, or the stories all end within twenty minutes. But why is the unplanned-pregnancy-leading-to-a-birth-and-happy-family story so popular all of a sudden? Perhaps we want to present an image of abortion as an option, but a desperate option; perhaps we want to say that keeping the baby is better and ultimately leads to greater happiness and sense of self. Ben becomes a more mature, more responsible adult through becoming a father. Jenna gains the strength and confidence to escape her marriage at least partially by taking on motherhood. Juno learns not to fear pursuing her friendship/relationship with Bleeker only after she has a child with him. In a way, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days follows this supposition, because for Gabita, abortion is a desperate option—so desperate that she is willing to risk murder charges to get one. Her historical situation is different from ours, but perhaps she is not so different from Allison, Jenna, and Juno, had the situations been reversed.

Conclusion

It might be possible to constitute a genre of the unplanned pregnancy based on the analysis of the three American films. The elements of pregnancy are treated quite similarly, and the effects of the pregnancy on the overall story, though clearly different based on the needs of the individual stories and to some degree on the expected audience, are generally the same: the pregnancy acts as a catalyst to improve the characters’ lives and relationships by encouraging them to become better or more understanding people. Thomas Schatz points out that differences between individual films of the same genre are to be expected, borrowing Saussure’s linguistic terminology to argue that "we might think of the film genre as a specific genre or system or rules of expression and construction and the individual genre films as a manifestation of those rules" (644). However, it must also be noted that even though the three American films fall into different subgenres of comedy (Judd Apatow, dramedy, teen comedy), they still remain essentially comedic and their depiction of pregnancy itself is not particularly altered by generic considerations. On the other hand, bringing 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days into the mix creates a great deal more confusion. Its thriller and art cinema elements alter the pregnancy story quite a lot even beyond the obvious substitution of abortion for full-term pregnancy. Its purpose is not to create a happy family out of the situation, nor to make better people out of its characters. Rather, its purposes are ambiguous, more concerned with evoking a mood, a horror, and an unsettling of the audience’s assumptions about pregnancy and abortion than in creating a conventionally satisfying story around them. Because 4 Months is the only one of these films to break significantly from the rest, it seems to disrupt what was a fairly good generic construct. However, it is also possible that the only reason the generic construct worked for the American films is that they also share many other generic considerations. Hence, the question of whether or not "unplanned pregnancy" constitutes a recognizable genre does not yet have a conclusive answer. Perhaps they do only within American cinema. Perhaps they do only within a specific genre. If 2007’s burst of unplanned pregnancy films continues in the future, the question can be reopened as new films in different genres and from different countries are added to the corpus.

 

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[1] A combination of drama and comedy, usually indicating a drama with a comedic edge or a comedy with dramatic undercurrents—too serious to be easily classed as comedy, but too funny to be purely drama.

[2] By "audience" in this paper, I mean whether the film was produced by a major Hollywood studio and intended for a wide release into mainstream multiplexes, or if it was produced by an independent filmmaker and was shown at film festivals and in limited release. Both Waitress and Juno fall somewhere in between.

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Works Cited

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Written and directed by Cristian Mungiu. Perf. Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu, Vlad Ivanov. IFC First Take, 2007.

Altman, Rick. "A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre." Cinema Journal 23.3 (1984): 6-18. Rpt. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 5^th Ed. NY: OUP, 1999. 630-641.

Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. NY: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Bordwell, David. "The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice." Film Criticism 4.1 (1979). Rpt. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 5^th Ed. NY: OUP, 1999. 716-724.

—. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

Juno. Written by Diablo Cody. Dir. Jason Reitman. Perf. Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman. Fox Searchlight, 2007.

Knocked Up. Written and directed by Judd Apatow. Perf. Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl. Universal Pictures, 2007.

Propp, Vladimir. From Morphology of the Folk Tale. Rpt. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2^nd Ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. 72-75.

—. "The Distribution of Functions Among Dramatis Personae." Morphology of the Folk Tale. 79-83. (class handout; do not know full bibliographic information)

Saussure, Ferdinand de. From Course in General Linguistics. Rpt. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2^nd Ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. 59-71.

Schatz, Thomas. "Film Genre and the Genre Film." Hollywood Genres. McGraw-Hill, 1981. Rpt. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 5^th Ed. NY: OUP, 1999. 642-653.

Waitress. Written and directed by Adrienne Shelly. Perf. Keri Russell, Nathan Fillion, Cheryl Hines, Adrienne Shelly. Fox Searchlight, 2007.

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This article was originally written in February 2008 for a class in Critical Theory at Baylor University.